This Blog is for people who want to shape the future, not watch it happen.

Monday, February 14, 2011

To the Reader

I'd like to address a few words to my dear readers, who may be confused by the projections I present in this blog. I do not fabricate these ideas out of thin air, they are the work of many years of hard research conducted very carefully by extremely intelligent persons like Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky and many many others. I simply digest these ideas and present some of them in a (to say the least) incomplete manner.
I try to put my enthusiasm into these ideas to propagate them to every person possible, because I believe it is extremely important for everyone to know about the promises and dangers the future holds.

What I want to tell you with the things I tell here, is that the very near future, that is the next 15-30 years, are of critical importance to our race. We have to come out of the 'bottle-neck' we have created ourselves. With our exponential growth we stressed the raw capacities of our planet hard, and will do so much in the future, so we need to tap new resources. As Richard Feynmann stated in his famous speech, 'There's plenty of room at the bottom', and nanotechnology is already pretty big on the horizon. Additionaly we can explore space and mine asteriods to get the raw material we lack here on earth (such as the elements of the rare earths), build habitats for people to live in and accomodate as many human beings as we need to.

So we don't lack the resources or the 'ground' for further exponential growth, but we certainly lack the social mechanisms to distribute the enormous wealth of human-free labor and endless resources. The economical and social systems of today are the outcome of a society living in scarcity and only the most 'valued' of it's members can enjoy the fruits of the civilization to the fullest. Members who didn't contribute anything vital for the society - always the majority of people - had to live in utter poorness and social stagnation. This, one can argue has to be, because noone would care for society as a whole if not for the great wealth and status connected with it. Today, things have changed drastically. Not only are we capable of producing everything necessary for the well-being of every human being on earth, but also we can connect in ways unthinkable only 20 years ago. This calls for a huge change in our distribution system which today, mainly consists of money, a relic of scarcity. The implications of the post-scarcity era must be included in today's social structures. Soon only 50% of the population will have any work at all, and we need to re-think the value of a human life, currently consisting of workforce and consuming power.

So, do you really live to work, even if you don't have to anymore, or do you wan't to live to enjoy company of others, art, science freely as you wish and when you wish?